One perspective is that these are major steps forward in transforming our mobility system from one that relies entirely on drivers, to a system dominated by riders. Alternatively, others express concerns about limitations of the technology, risks inherent in removing drivers’ moment-to-moment touch from the steering wheel, cost implications of subsidizing automated mobility, and the need for a demonstrated safety benefit. With all of the rhetoric around autonomy, it’s hard to tell who’s right and who’s wrong.

A realist’s view might look at recent events more as important but still incremental movement along a long, winding and still evolving path. In short, it’s not about what the future will look like, which will be a highly automated mobility system, but about the timeframe to get there. With all of the variant headlines, how do investors, policymakers and the public sort through the noise and develop educated estimates of what lies ahead? The answer may very well be that it depends on one’s view of success in autonomy.

While one might be excited about the exceedingly impressive technological advances being displayed on public roads, optimistic biases can hold someone back from fully discussing technological limitations, ethical dilemmas, safety concerns, etc. emerging along the way to a desired goal. Others have too much of a pessimistic view, failing to appreciate or give due credit to the complexities that have been overcome.

The promise of convenient, lower cost and safer mobility has excited many. With initial efforts limited to small areas in vehicles overseen by skilled safety drivers, skeptics may argue about fine details of the finances of the model and the valuations assigned. While such questioning might seem reasonable within a traditional business context, they may very well be shortsighted at a time when some of the world’s largest companies are shifting their entire business models to accommodate the paradigm shift in mobility offered through automated and electric vehicles. Perhaps one or more of the players are no longer bounded by a traditional focus on quarterly profit – operating on a decade or longer view of ultimate profit, strategy more analogous to economic decisions of nation states or the investments seen historically in medical innovation.

Finally, there’s a range of perspectives on the theoretical complexities of successful human-robot integration on our roads. If theory was perfect, no one would need to look outside of laboratory modeling. Real-world operational data being generated from the Advanced Vehicle Technology Consortium (AVT) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (an effort launched more than three years ago to better understand consumer use of production level vehicle automation systems) characterize behavior of early adopters that are capable of using automated driving features as an integrated part of their daily lives. An essential part of successful route finding is the need for more data to refine educated guesses about the future, as well as a critical component of better estimating the safety benefit of future automated driving systems.

For those with a keen view of the future, it’s not about the number of successful miles traveled, the degree to which human oversight is needed for the robots to operate on our roads today or the cost differential between a highly automated solution and a fully manual vehicle (though certainly all are meaningful). It’s about a pragmatic perspective on a much larger and longer evolution, in which today’s accomplishments are nothing more than a celebration of milestones along the way in the evolution of the technology and its ecosystem. New data and discoveries will continue to deepen our understanding of the intersection of artificial intelligence, robotics and good old-fashioned humans on our roads.

John Krafcik, Waymo’s CEO, alluded quite reasonably to this in a recent interview when he spoke of the difficulties involved, the speed at which the self-driving vehicle industry will move forward, and the fact that driverless vehicles will always have constraints. In essence, while automation may be the future, the enabling technologies we are seeing today are pieces of a complex puzzle being assembled to build a picture of how automation will change the future of how we live and move.